The modern customer wants and needs the entire process of making a purchase online to be as simple and straightforward as possible. Fail to offer complete and unhindered convenience when it comes to selling products and services, and you risk losing potential customers and driving existing ones to your competitors’ websites. If your goal is to increase the conversion results, then you have to take your entire sales process into the 21st century and integrate an omnichannel sales solution.
In a nutshell, this means that you should no longer focus solely on your website as your primary sales tool, but instead, you should focus equally on multiple sales channels that will allow customers to buy from you no matter if they are on your site, browsing through social media, calling you on the phone or sending you an SMS, or other. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the most important channels for your new omni-channel sales approach.
Offer Real-Time Chat And Support
Given the fact that the modern customer is all about shopping convenience, you have to make yourself readily available to chat with them in real-time. No longer is the customer willing to wait hours or God forbid days for a brand representative to answer their question or get back to them with a product selection – no, by that time they will have already found a better deal and a more responsive company. You need to make yourself available at all times.
To achieve this, it’s important that you integrate a chat function into the website that will operate on a 24/7 basis, preferably. What’s more, consider outsourcing this function to a professional team that can manage customer queries in multiple languages, which will immensely help with international sales if you are, for example, running a global eCommerce venture.
Allow And Encourage Social Purchases
Social media is a gargantuan market that was worth more than 39 billion euros in 2019. Every growth-oriented company has to make itself available to its customers and followers on all relevant social media channels in order to snag their piece of this huge financial cake; however, social media is not just about elevating your brand’s visibility, it’s also about direct sales inspired by advertising and engagement. Nowadays, customers want the ability to buy products and services directly from their chosen social platforms.
To Provide Them With The Ability To Purchase Through Social Media Directly, You Have To:
- Educate your social managers on proper sales tactics via DM.
- Establish a code of conduct for your social managers and educate them on how to transform an inquiry into a sale.
- Create shoppable content such as videos, images, and infographics that have clickable elements that take customers directly to the product page.
- Position hyper-targeted ads and personalize them based on the user’s shopping and browsing history.
Using these tactics will allow you to drive sales through multiple channels on social media alone, however, you also need to have a strong system in place to help you manage the omnichannel sales process as a whole. This leads us to our next crucial point.
Manage All Sales Channels
When you’re trying to execute an Omni-sales strategy, there are a couple of things that can go awry rather quickly, the biggest of problems being that you can’t manage all of those orders in a timely fashion. And so, something invariably slips through the cracks, which can jeopardize your brand’s reputation and authority.
This is especially problematic for companies that can experience large sales volumes through multiple channels at the same time, such as the manufacturing sector, which is why business leaders are increasingly integrating solutions like the ERPAG cloud-based manufacturing software that allows them to optimize all points of sale through a comprehensive overview of the entire sales structure. Following the same mindset, you can integrate a cloud-based solution for your industry that will provide you with all of the tools you need to field orders with ease, manage inventory in real-time, and maintain logistics as well.
Sell More With eCommerce
The mobile industry is on a never-ending upward trajectory, and nowadays customers are increasingly browsing the web and shopping via their smartphones – which means that you have to adapt your sales strategy for the rising mobile demographic in order to boost sales. Whether you do that by developing your own mobile app, or if you optimize your website for seamless mobile browsing is up to you, but you should keep a couple of key things in mind:
- Mobile apps offer little in terms of SEO.
- You can leverage accelerated mobile pages to create a mobile-friendly website.
- Google looks favorably on mobile-friendly sites, so you will instantly gain more exposure in the SERPs.
- It’s imperative that you make browsing a breeze on all handheld devices.
- It’s also imperative that you simplify the shopping process as much as possible because clicking on a bunch of buttons on mobile can be a chore.
- Include instant voice-call buttons and encourage mobile shoppers to give you a call in any of the stages of their shopping journey – if they get stuck, you’ll be able to help them out.
Don’t Forget About Phone And SMS
Finally, don’t dismiss the idea of offline sales channels such as phone calls and SMS. Offline text messaging, in particular, is making a big comeback nowadays, and forward-looking brands are using this tried-and-tested feature to send surveys and collect customer data, but also to sell their products. You can do this in one of two ways:
- You can allow customers to send you an SMS and order products, or;
- You can send curated product lists or special promotions directly via SMS on a regular basis, and inspire them to place their order with a simple reply.
This is a quick and easy way to establish a direct line of communication, and incentivize a positive response.
Wrapping up
There’s been a lot of talk about omnichannel marketing in recent years, and yes, it works wonders for growth-oriented companies. However, if you want to truly boost sales in 2020 and beyond, be sure to integrate an omni-channel sales strategy as well. We hope these tips lead to better omnichannel sales.
